popagandhi.com Archives - 16 April 2012, Monday

White cabbage is death. If there is a Creator, it is one of his less glorious moments. The only thing worse than white cabbage is white cabbage soup. I am a soup maniac, but white cabbage soup I do not touch with a ten foot pole. I cannot even sit at the same table when it is being dr...

They were the crazy thoughts that slip into your head when you meet someone for the first time — at a bar, or at least that’s how it was for me. The furious back-and-forth binary exchanges through various electronic sources. A text. An email. A few stamps in your passport and many fli...

My father was having a conversation with one of the students at the university where he works. Apparently one of them was a frequent visitor to this site. He told my dad as much and said I don’t write anymore, that this site is pretty much defunct. When your father brings you these ne...

I am a Singaporean who lives in a series of hash tags. They are: #iamchinese my race, my ethnicity, a language I speak, “mother tongue” classes I struggled with and the colour of my skin #iamasian a vague identity I hold; ‘one of them’ in the tribes of Northeast India and I am ‘one of...

There comes a point in every traveller’s life when the experience of going to a foreign place no longer feels the same, nor as exciting as it used to be when she first began. Cities blur into similar skylines, restaurants and bars. Non-cities remain precisely that—good in small doses ...

Whether it’s a long-haul transatlantic flight or a regional short hop, or even just a trip out on a local bus, the process of meeting and eventually talking to strangers, can lead one to use quick heuristics in sizing them up. Perhaps it’s our automatic mechanism to do so in order to ...

To put things into perspective the 10 000 kilometres between us means we you are only 20 times further from me than you usually are, and soon that will half to merely 5000. I can’t talk to you without shouting into a computer or pressing a million calling card digits followed by # fol...

I could not have asked for a better way to end the Rickshaw Challenge, having had such a great first day; but something about Thiruvannaamalai did not sit well with me. The hotel’s staff started off friendly and grovelling, but when they found out my team did not intend to plan to sta...

We set off from Madras one hot morning, dressed to the nines. It was a good idea before flag-off, this brilliant idea we had of dressing just like a rickshaw wallah . The previous nights we had been in Pondy Bazaar every night, looking for various items to complete our get up. We’d pl...